Blog #2 - Brittney McLaughlin

In the original blog post by Robin, he shared a bit about having ADHD, and how diagnosis and treatment of this at a younger age may have changed his life, for better or for worse. This immediately made me reflect on my own psychological disorder, and how my diagnosis shaped my life. When I was in middle school, I began to be physically ill all the time when I had to go to school. After various doctor appointments and testing that revealed no abnormalities, I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. As a 12 year old, I thought that the fact that I had to go through therapy meant that I was crazy. I was embarrassed. I don't remember ever hearing anything about mental health as we do today. Instead of making me feel better, I just felt more ostracized than ever. I didn't know of any of my friends dealing with anything similar - so I went through the rest of grade school assuming something was wrong with me and never wanting to talk about this 'disorder.' There would be days that I would wake up and know that I needed to stay home from school and rest, but the thought of missing class would cause my anxiety to worsen - it was a catch 22.

However, when I started college, there seemed to be this big push for mental health awareness, and my friends started to be upfront in telling me, "hey, I'm taking a mental health day, so I won't be in class," and instructors began including mental health information in their syllabi. It became okay, and normal, to have anxiety. I stopped hiding from it and started to realize that nearly everyone my age was dealing with some form of anxiety with the great pressures put on us in today's society. It wasn't even until recently that I became completely comfortable taking care of myself rather than worsening my mental health by going to class or to a party; I finally understood that my health is more important than maintaining a 4.0 or socializing with people that I don't particularly enjoy being around.

My point with all of this is, I truly believe that by putting this label on those experiencing anxiety can jeopardize their feeling of belonging. While I'm sure that in some cases, a diagnosis that leads to medication or therapy can be very beneficial, I didn't find this to be true for me. Modern science's obsession for putting a name to everything made my childhood more difficult and stressful than it needed to be. Of course, there's a chance that things could've somehow been 10x worse had I not been diagnosed, but there's really no way of knowing, just as Robin says that there's not really a way to know if his life would've been different had he been diagnosed with ADHD. I think that this could result in good discussion as to whether or not these more mild/manageable 'disorders' should really warrant 'diagnosis.' Robin went undiagnosed, and grew into a wonderful, educated person. Many people have undoubtably gone undiagnosed with anxiety and were able to handle obstacles on their own and be just fine. Do we diagnose every single 'abnormality' such as anxiety and ADHD with the understanding that it's not best for everyone? Or do we leave many undiagnosed with the knowledge that we could be helping many of those people?